You can build a great website about a very important topic, and it won’t do anybody any good if people cannot find it. The most common way that internet users find website is through searches on the large search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN. Let’s say that your website is about “Big Red Widgets”. As a webmaster, you call that your niche, and the term will be your keywords. Surfers, just think of “Big Red Widgets” something they are looking for. When those searchers type in keywords like “Big Red Widgets”, that is exactly what they want to find on the website they visit. The problem you have, as a website owner, is competing with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other websites that also mention “Big Red Widgets!”

The first thing you need to do with your website, or even an individual page on your website, is determine why it exists at all. Lets say you want to sell coffee on your website. Your front page probably has the site navigation to all your other pages, contact information, and a brief introduction to your your subject. Other pages may describe various types of coffee that people can order. Let us say that you believe you can sell a lot of dark roast coffee because you have an inexpensive introductory offer.

So the second thing you want to do is make sure your page is optimized for the action you want a surfer to take! In your title, heading, and some text on the page, you might use a phrase like, “buy cheap dark roast coffee.” That is called optimizing your website for a specific search term. I am not writing that “buy cheap dark roast coffee” is a good or bad search term. You need to learn how to research that, and that would be the subject of another article. But that is what I am using for an example.

Now it is not enough to have a great sales page that is optimized for a specific set of search terms. You also need to have other websites pointing back to you with that term in the text of their links. This text that is hyper linked to you is called anchor text. Webmasters call the links that point back to their sites backlinks. In fact, if you do not have other websites pointing back to you with that anchor text, it is unlikely that you will rank well with any search terms that have competition.

You can obtain these links by submitting your page to directories. You can also submit articles to sites that allow you to link back to your site. Social bookmarking is a newer, popular, and effective way to obtain links back to your site. If your term is very competitive, this can be a lot of work, but it is essential. If you think that your time is used best by designing your website and running your business, you may choose to outsource this part of the job to a company that specializes in finding places to get links to websites.

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